The Icelandic Coast Guard named its three new H225 helicopters after Norse gods, but it is the people that are capable of incredible feats.
In November 2022 in northwestern Iceland, the crew of an Icelandic Coast Guard Airbus Helicopters H225 Super Puma were faced with a dilemma universally loathed by search-and-rescue (SAR) crews wherever they operate.
Around them, the jagged rocks of the Icelandic fjords were battered by gusts of over 50 knots, and enveloped in the thick, freezing cold cloud, characteristic of the North Atlantic winter. With their helicopter low on fuel, and a critically ill patient waiting just five kilometers (three miles) away, they would have to somehow navigate their way into the lethal mix of rock, rain, and furious tailwinds. Or they would have to leave.
“The main challenge is basically the weather. It changes rapidly and it’s very unforgiving.” Sigurður Heiðar Wiium is the chief pilot of the Icelandic Coast Guard and goes by “Siggi” for those not gifted enough to speak Icelandic. While the principal task of the Coast Guard is maritime law enforcement and surveillance, rescue missions and aviation have played an important part in its history, he explained.
“The Icelandic Coast Guard is approximately 100 years old, having started with a rescue vessel,” he said. “Over the years, further vessels were added and then the first aircraft arrived in the ‘50s.”
The aviation department began with a PBY-6A Catalina flying boat in 1955, but soon gravitated to helicopters, first with a variety of Bell 47s and Sikorsky S-62s and S-76s, and then by 2007, with a more consolidated mix of AS365 Dauphin IIs and Eurocopter AS332L1 Pumas, with a Bombardier DHC-8-Q314 fixed-wing patrol aircraft in support.
In 2019, the Coast Guard decided to lease two Airbus Helicopters H225s, and today, their fleet now comprises solely of three H225s. The new aircraft are named Gná, Eir and Gró after figures from Norse mythology with powers ranging from healing the gods to riding a flying horse. While the helicopters themselves have proven more temporal, they have nevertheless impressed the crews.
“It’s proven quite a big step with a lot of benefits in performance,” said Björn Brekkan Björnsson, a helicopter captain and the head of training. He explained that some of the previous aircraft had struggled to cope with the severe turbulence that Iceland can produce.
“Flying up at 10,000 feet [3,050 meters] in mountain waves and icing, descending at 500 ft. [152 m] per minute at max power is not a nice place to be,” he said. “We often have to cross mountains up to 7,000 ft. [2,134 m] in icing and poor weather, and the H225 has proven reliable in these conditions.”
The heavier airframe has also “reduced the workload quite a lot,” Björn said. “It has more inertia, so the wind and turbulence doesn’t affect it as much, and the stability of the autopilot has brought a dramatic change to our operations.”
Equally important, the H225 has demonstrated a benefit vital to the Icelandic environment — fuel consumption. The country is 305 mi (490 km) north to south, and 185 mi (300 km) east to west. “We have an island that is 103,000 square kilometers [39,000 square miles], an exclusive economic area that is 750,000 sq. km [290,000 sq. mi], and a rescue area that is 1.9 million sq. km [733,000 sq. mi],” Björn said.
When the Coast Guard acquired the H225, there was a plan to deploy the aircraft around the island to different bases on a rotational basis. The lack of infrastructure ultimately meant that all three are based in the capital, Reykjavik, on the southwest coast.
Crews have quickly learned that having the largest aircraft in the country comes with a correspondingly large workload. As well as offshore tasks, there are plenty of jobs for helicopters inland — from fighting brush and forest fires in the summer months, to sling-loading critical infrastructure into remote sites, or even ferrying scientists across the country to study its unique environment.
“On patrol flights, we are looking for illegal fishing or ships fishing in places they’re not supposed to be,” Björn said. “But it depends on the time of the year. We are constantly juggling back and forth. I enjoy the complications of the different operations.”
Up in the air
While it might be enjoyable, Björn’s role as head of training makes him responsible for ensuring that crews are up to any task that might be demanded of them.
“It takes a lot of time to train someone to be competent and confident in what they are doing,” he noted. “It takes three to four years for a pilot to really get into the system, and it’s the same with the hoist operators — hoisting in mountains, over water, from ships and in different weather.”
Scheduling such a variety of training would be challenging enough, but with SAR by far the most common task, the reactive nature of the job can easily sabotage the best laid plans.
“We have a lot of different tasks that we need to train, but if we have an emergency mission, the training flights get rescheduled,” Björn said. “So, the schedule is never going to be correct. We end up having to replan all the time. When I start my shift on a Wednesday, I don’t have a clue what will actually happen.”
Forecasting may be difficult, but some responses are almost a certainty. Iceland’s population swells during the summer as millions of tourists arrive to enjoy the breathtaking beauty of the landscape. Inevitably, a few find themselves victims to the ruthless climate. As the country’s popularity increases, so has the workload of the Icelandic Coast Guard.
“The tasking is becoming more frequent inland,” Björn explained. “It used to be about 70% offshore, but this is changing due to more tourists inland.”
Consequently, despite the nominal law enforcement focus and broad capabilities, the composition of the Icelandic Coast Guard helicopter crews is tailored for one thing — SAR. “The helicopters are crewed pretty much always for search-and-rescue,” Siggi said.
A SAR crew consists of two pilots, a navigator/rescue specialist, and a technician/hoist operator. Doctors from a local hospital will join the crew to provide medical expertise. “The doctor is not a technical crew member, but we treat them as part of the crew,” Siggi said. “They do HUET [helicopter underwater escape training] and participate in CRM [crew resource management] and hoist training, for both inland and offshore hoisting.”
To supplement that medical expertise, rescue specialists and hoist operators also receive medical training. “We are all EMT basic trained,” said Hrannar Sigurdsson, a mechanic and hoist operator who started his career as a fixed-wing aviation technician and joined the Coast Guard in 2007. He completed his training as a hoist operator in 2010 and is one of 16 mechanics — eight of whom are hoist operators. All have other duties, such as operations planning or technical maintenance roles. Technicians not on flying duties can expect to work a line maintenance shift for a week, followed by a week off and two weeks in heavy maintenance.
When flying as part of a crew, they are depended upon to provide the technical expertise necessary to keep the aircraft functioning when support could be many hours away.
“Sometimes we are flying in the country, and you have to solve whatever problems the aircraft brings to you,” Hrannar said.
It’s clearly a job that comes with plenty of responsibility, but perhaps none more so than during a hoist operation. “We are basically the pilot’s eyes during the hoist,” he said. “We are sitting in the door, and we guide the pilot in the right position.”
While his modest manner may make this sound as simple as parking a truck, Hrannar could be working at night, in dreadful weather conditions, and over a heaving sea, with a person’s life hanging in the balance and another one hanging on a hoist cable just 3/16 inches thick. It is impossible to overstate the importance of teamwork and communication between the hoist operator and the pilot under such circumstances.
Vision by night
Brynhildur Ásta Bjartmarz is one such pilot, and it is this kind of environment that she dreamed of working in from the very start of her career. “I knew the Coast Guard was where I wanted to end up,” she said. “My stepfather was a Coast Guard pilot. I think that’s the only reason I ever thought about being a pilot myself.”
Having trained initially on fixed-wing aircraft, Brynhildur qualified on helicopters in the U.S. and gained her instrument rating in Sweden. Once accepted into the Icelandic Coast Guard soon after her qualification, she gained her first type rating on the AS332, with line training following immediately afterward.
“Once you’ve finished your line training, you are kind of in the thick of it as you never know what missions you will be called up for,” she explained. “You hold off sling-loading and firefighting, but otherwise, you start doing everything.”
Most of the flying represented a steady continuation of skills she had applied on smaller aircraft, but there was one aspect which was completely new — night vision goggles (NVGs). “It’s a big leap. I started in April and had the summer to get used to things, but I remember in the winter going into NVGs. That was a big difference,” she said.
Björn has flown with the Coast Guard long enough to remember SAR operations before NVGs, and credits them with revolutionizing the operation. “NVGs are an absolute game-changer,” he said. “We implemented them in ‘02 after a couple of close calls and increased our night capability by 90%, both in terms of safety and operational capability.”
The H225s have also come with TrakkaBeam searchlights and WESCAM thermal imaging cameras, which have shone in the Coast Guard’s SAR role, helping detect the heat of a survivor against the cold sea — technology literally making the difference between life and death.
However, the god-like powers of all this technology do not come with immortality. Iceland, despite its stunning beauty, has little mercy for those who push the boundaries too far. There are real risks and balancing them is arguably the most important skill that H225 crews possess. “You know what you’re getting into,” said Brynhildur. “You kind of have to know what you can do and what your aircraft can do and trust your crew. That’s why we train.”
That trust, knowledge and confidence proved vital in November 2022, when an Icelandic Coast Guard crew was forced to decide between facing the very worst of the North Atlantic weather or leaving a casualty a few miles away. Flying into a fjord with a 50-knot tailwind would have left them no way out. So, in almost zero visibility, with the hoist operator giving directions, they put the aircraft’s nose into the wind and reversed the whole way. With the casualty on board, they could then safely exit the fjord into wind. It took 20 minutes.
It wasn’t something that they had ever trained to do, but it took tremendous trust and skill to execute. According to the doctor who treated the casualty, the maneuver almost certainly saved a life.
Of the crews that Vertical Valor spoke to, all struggled to recall a notable experience. “Combine flying a great aircraft together with assisting people in dire need of help, all year round,” Siggi said matter-of-factly. “Adding those together provides a lot of enjoyable experiences.”
It’s tempting to think of this as a kind of national resilience that comes from living on an island hundreds of miles from the nearest neighbor, where boiling water comes out of the frozen ground. But it seems more likely that there are so many similar experiences that for the crews who train together and trust each other, such missions just become normal.
“I don’t know which ones to pick out,” Brynhildur mused as though contemplating where she had left her keys. “One time we rescued seven men from a burning ship, but there’s a lot of things you remember.”
